Fic: Beneath Our Blackened Hearts (Sam/Dean, NC-17) Part 4 of 4
Back to Part 3
There’s been some stuff missing in the garage lately, tools, the rope that usually lives in the Impala’s trunk, that kind of thing. To avoid dealing with the is-Michael-still-lurking-issue, or the WTF-Sam-issue, Dean decides to investigate something mundane and petty instead. His first guess is that the other hunters were helping themselves to his stash of supplies without asking. Or maybe their “chief” Mr. New-Bobby had approved their sticky fingers. All he knows is, his shit is missing. He sits at the workbench in the garage and checks the last week or so of the video files from the video monitoring system that he’d installed a few years ago for the garage entrance.
He initially just wants to see who’s been coming and going, maybe find out if there are any patterns. At first, Dean sees the usual folks, himself, Sam, Cas and Jack, all expected and boring. Then there’s an unfortunately long interlude of mom and New-Bobby that he fast forwards through without looking too closely at the details. But then finally, there’s someone he doesn’t recognize. She’s beautiful, on the small side, with dark hair. She’s moving so quickly he can’t see her face clearly, but then she pauses and the video shows a very clear retinal flare. She slips in through the door to the bunker. He looks at the date and time, four days ago. Back when he’d first heard the noises in the hallway, and Sam had started…everything between them.
He fast forwards through the last few days and there’s nothing, until about an hour ago when Sam comes in. He sees Sam and his big hulking shoulders rolling one of the vintage motorcycles out of the garage door without starting it which is weird enough, and also-Sam doesn’t know how to ride a motorcycle. Dean pauses the playback when Sam comes back into the garage without the motorcycle. His face comes into clear focus, and Dean’s not sure what he’s seeing. Is it a video artifact, or is he just misreading it, he’s not sure. He rewinds and plays it forward again, and there-Sam’s eyes flash in that distinctive otherworldly, monster-y way that all of them seem to have on video. It’s a shock seeing the flare coming from Sam’s eyes though, it reminds Dean of seeing the blue angel flash when Gadreel would take over. Never again, he’d promised himself.
The likely meaning of it all crashes into him, crushing him under its weight. He needs to do something about this-now. Either Sam is possessed by something or there's a creature at loose in the bunker that is able to do a bang-up job of impersonating him. The woman from four days ago, the one with the retinal flare, could she have been some sort of shape-shifter?
Dean’s stomach lurches as he considers a little further. The Sam that he’d kissed and everything else in the kitchen yesterday, that probably hadn’t been his Sam. He should have known, it wouldn’t ever be that easy or simple for Sam to cross that line. And Sam wouldn’t have tasted like the smoky remnants of an incense burner. Who or what would taste like that, though?
“Me…Dean, it would taste like me,” Sam says from right behind him. And he knows he didn’t say a damn thing out loud, knows in an instant that this is a monster that can read his mind, and more importantly is one who is not really his Sam. He whirls around throwing a punch low and hard, all his force and power and rage behind his fist. Not-Sam flies back into the storage cabinet, knocking his head into the cement brick wall with an audible crack. He crashes to the floor and goes limp like he’s been knocked out.
Dean throws himself forward, pinning him to the rough floor. Not-Sam thrashes underneath him, struggling to push Dean off.
“You’re not him, so who the fuck are you?” Dean yells into his not-brother’s face. “Where the hell is my brother?”
Dean realizes that if this is Sam’s body, then he just took a really hard hit to the head, because his brother’s eyes can’t seem to focus. He worries for a split second that he’s hurt his brother. The dude is the last person in the world who deserves yet another head injury. But this isn’t his brother, right?
In the next split second, Sam’s face crumples up into the biggest grin, and he bursts out laughing, sarcastic and harsh. “Took you long enough, asshole,” Sam spits up into Dean’s face.
Dean’s not falling for it though, little brother tricks pulled on him by something that’s not really his little brother are still just a distraction ploy. He tightens his hold on Sam’s wrists. “Tell me now, or I’ll gut you here and now like you deserve.”
“Tch, tch, tch, Dean-o, that’s no way to treat a lady,” Sam says, his face changing and melting into someone else’s.
Dean’s grip on her wrists falters as they transform into something much smaller, suddenly she looks very familiar, she’s the woman on the video system from a few days ago. But it’s more than that, he knows he should recognize who she is, but all he can do is fight to hold her down. She’s so damn strong, even weakened with the shot she took to the head, he’s not going to be able to hold her much longer. He struggles and yells, hoping against hope that his brother is somewhere close enough that he can hear him, “Sam! I need you! In the garage, now!”
The fight goes on, the woman or whatever she is really knows how to hold her own, even with the head injury. When she manages to get a hand free, she keeps reaching for his chest like she wants to rip his heart out or something. He finally gets her flipped over in a wrestling hold, her face smashed against the cement floor, his knee on her lower back. That’s when he remembers a similar fight, one that he’d definitely been losing, until Sam had saved him at the last moment. “You’re that qareen thing, I thought we already killed you.”
She struggles beneath him and almost throws him off completely. “That was my sister you fucking asshole. I’m here to return the fucking favor.”
Dean slams her head into the cement floor as hard as he can manage. Her struggling weakens quite a bit. “You’ve been messing with us, huh? For how long?” Dean asks, stomach dropping with the realization that all of it, everything he thought he’d gotten in the last few days was a damn lie.
“You two…ah it’s been so damn fun. Your angst is off-the-charts delicious, I have to tell you. Wish I was a siren, I’d be feeding on you forever.”
“Sam! It’s a qareen, you gotta find the heart thingy!” Dean yells. He’s heartened to hear some crashing down the hall. That means Sam is moving at least, she didn’t have him immobilized or worse. The sounds of something crashing into the walls gets louder and closer.
“Dean!” Sam yells. He lands in the garage entrance, tied to a chair that he’s apparently been jumping down the hall, bashing into the walls from the looks of him. He’s red and flustered, hair everywhere with a furious look on his face. “I know right where it is, I just can’t get myself untied.”
Dean watches with amusement as Sam jumps the chair closer and closer, stopping just next to them. He slams the qareen’s head into the floor again when she laughs. “Heya, Sammy,” Dean says with relief, he’s so damn glad to see him. “Can you hold her with your feet or something so I can untie you?” Sam’s giant feet land on her back and press down-hard.
The qareen lets out a grunt of pain and weakly squirms under all the weight that Sam’s pressing into her. “Get off me you fucking oaf!”
“Not today,” Sam says between gritted teeth, struggling to keep enough force on her to hold her down. Dean gets him untied and then they’re both holding her immobile beneath them. Dean tries not to feel how his fingers are still tingling from touching Sam’s skin. This isn’t a thing he should ever think about again, especially not with the real Sam right there and a monster beneath them they need to deal with.
“You said you know where the heart thing is stashed?” Dean asks, panting hard at the exertion of the fight and the sheer relief of seeing his brother alive.
Sam stretches out to grab a giant wrench from the work bench and hits the qareen upside the head. In an instant she goes limp under the two of them. “Yeah, it’s in my room. You hold her, just in case she comes around.”
“Yeah, I’ve got her, go,” Dean says, grabbing a length of rope from one of the bins under the work bench. He quickly secures her legs to her arms behind her in a hopefully inescapable series of wraps and knots. “Wait, why is it in your room?” Dean asks Sam’s retreating back. He doesn’t get an answer, maybe he won’t get any answers out of this whole thing. It’s all so messed up. He punches the qareen in her slackened face just because, she may have finally done what so many of their other supernatural foes have attempted over the years-broken the Winchesters completely.
Dean thinks about it while he has the chance and Sam isn’t here distracting him. Are they really truly broken this time, is this a thing they can come back from? Maybe she didn’t do the same thing to both of them? That’s the only chance he can see, because he doesn’t know if he can live with Sam knowing the truth after all these years. Sam hadn’t seemed particularly freaked or upset just now, but then they were in the middle of taking down the qareen. He’s going to go with that for the moment, just pretend nothing has changed, nothing major has happened. Hopefully he can get through this to the other side with his brother not hating him forever or leaving or worse. (What could be worse than that?)
Sam races down the hall to his bedroom and drops to his knees next to his bed. He grabs his memory box, in a second he’s got it open and his sharpest silver knife is embedded in the black and shriveled thing that used to be the qareen’s heart. It’s a lot juicier than he’d hoped, it leaks all over the brochure from that retirement home. He picks the brochure up and takes it out, closes the memory box and shoves it back under his bed. Holding the brochure with the stabbed heart he walks back down the hall towards his brother. The one who he probably will never be able to look in the eye again. He pauses in the garage doorway, takes a deep breath and tries to hide everything he’s feeling. It’s pretty easy, he’s been doing it for twenty years now.
“She dead?” Sam asks, holding the brochure out so Dean can see the stabbed heart. It looks like his own feels, black and crumbled, run through so thoroughly, the pain that’s coursing through him is almost too much to bear.
“Dead and dusted, yeah. Guess you’re two for two on killing qareens now,” Dean says, standing up from the mess on the garage floor that used to be the qareen. He looks down at the blackened thing in the brochure and smiles. “She put it in your memory box, huh?”
“How did you even kn-?” Sam asks, cutting himself off. Because of course they have no visible secrets, just like when they lived out of the car all those years. Only the invisible ones that they keep inside where they’re supposed to be safe.
“I think it’s cute you keeping that. And that retirement place was really nice. I wouldn’t mind ending up there,” Dean says.
“Really?” Sam asks, unbelieving that Dean’s voicing something like this, like it’s no big deal.
“It’d be good for us to have something to look forward to like that, don’t you think?” Dean asks.
Sam considers what exactly his brother means by this question. It could run the gamut from just not wanting to die alone, or to wanting to live together for the rest of their lives. As in: Together together. “It is, yeah, that’s why I kept it in my secret memory box that isn’t much of a secret apparently.”
“Sorry, I was vacuuming in there and it got knocked over and I couldn’t help myself. I apologize for snooping,” Dean says, sounding like he means it, but still in that big brother teasing way that makes Sam bristle a little at the invasiveness.
“You are a terrible snoop, always have been,” Sam says. “But I can’t complain too much about it, at least you vacuum.”
“Big brother code, man. Them’s the rules,” Dean says with a grin.
Sam feels it then, the two pathways they have from this moment. They can ignore what the qareen put them through and just continue on as they have always been. But…but what about if they choose the other path? The one where they have each other and make each other happy for the rest of their lives. Sam wants that with all his heart and soul, it’s a fierce and powerful need that makes him take down his walls and let Dean see it all plainly on his face. He watches his brother as he sees and understands, he sees the fear flicker over and turn into resolve. That’s his Dean, gotta make the big sacrifice, always has to be the bravest, most self-sacrificing shit around.
“I think of you as more than just my big brother though,” Sam says, still leaving Dean this one last offramp. He watches Dean’s face closely, sees when he makes the decision. Sam squares his shoulders and takes a deep breath, here comes the rejection he knows he deserves.
“I know, Sammy,” Dean says soft and careful.
Sam reaches out and cups the side of Dean’s face, remembers what it was like this past week, how he’d shared all of that with a creature and not this man that he’s loved in all ways for his whole life. How he’d been so desperate for it that he’d missed all the signs that it hadn’t really been his Dean. “I’m just sorry that it wasn’t really you.”
“Me too, I would have like to have been there, and vice versa, I guess,” Dean says, smiling so wide and genuine, Sam can’t help himself, he presses his fingertips in a bit harder into the skin of Dean’s cheek, the warm tingle of their connection still so strong. He feels his blackened heart absorbing this small moment of tenderness, it’ll be enough to get by on, it’ll have to be. He drops his hand and starts to walk away.
“We should probably talk about all this,” Dean says, just as Sam is passing out of the garage. He stops and thinks for a moment about how hard it must have been for his brother to say those words. He turns around and looks at Dean, the mess of the dead qareen at his feet, the vast space of the garage behind him. He looks so small and fierce and he’s so dear, he means everything to Sam, he gasps as his heart seems to do a turn in his chest. He presses his hand over it, like he’s holding it inside. And maybe he is.
“Yeah, if you want to, sure. Meet me in the kitchen, I need to go get changed,” Sam says, and then he’s down the hall and back in his room, safe for the moment. He strips his clothes off and washes his face in the sink. All of a sudden he’s so damn tired he can barely stand. The worry and emotions of it all is too much. He curls up in bed and hopes Dean will be able to wait to talk.
Sam wakes up, surprised that he had been able to fall asleep. His front side is warm, because there’s someone next to him in the bed. He opens his eyes and sees that it’s Dean, and for a long moment he just stares, even though Dean obviously sees he’s awake. He catalogs through his feelings quickly and can’t find anything that quite matches, dread, pleased surprise, inevitability-all of that and more.
“Thought we were meeting in the kitchen,” Sam says, glad that he’s all the way under the covers since he’s not wearing a thing. Hopefully Dean hasn’t noticed, he doesn’t want this to get more awkward than it’s already going to be.
“I couldn’t wait anymore, so I thought I’d come in here and wait,” Dean admits.
That seems like they’re off to a good start, that Dean wants to be in the same room with him, even take the chance to lay down on his bed and wait for him to wake up.
“How long was I out?” Sam asks.
“Long enough,” Dean says.
“Long enough for what?” Sam asks.
“How was her heart in your memory box, Sam? I thought that was just for whoever was controlling the qareen,” Dean says, instead of answering his question. Sam guesses it was just long enough for Dean to start obsessing over the who did what to whom issues.
“She said she was the qareen’s sister, the one we killed before, right?”
“Yeah, something like that, she said she was coming here to mess with us and avenge her sister,” Dean says, after a few beats where Sam can’t think of a thing to say, because he knows what Dean is obsessing over, Dean carries on, “She sure as hell messed with us, not so much on the avenging.”
“I wasn’t controlling her if that’s what you’re thinking,” Sam says.
“No-what, why would I think that?” Dean sputters, obviously offended at the idea.
“Well, we’re both wondering why the hell she would put her own heart in my memory box?” Sam asks.
“Maybe she wanted me to find it? Mess us up even more or something?” Dean asks.
“She really did screw with us, didn’t she?” Sam asks, regretting using the word screw almost immediately.
“It doesn’t have to screw…uh, mess us up, unless-you think it has to,” Dean says, biting his lip like he’s trying not to say something more.
That right there is enough to blow Sam’s mind completely apart, maybe for good. How can he possibly trust this isn’t some leftover effect from the qareen? “I don’t-I mean, you’re right it doesn’t have to mess us up. We can just forget it happened, right?”
“If that’s what you want, sure, we can give it a try. We’ll just forget the last few days ever happened,” Dean says, starting to sit up, he obviously wants to get out as fast as possible.
Sam sits up too, wanting to stop Dean before he leaves, forgetting that he’s naked, the covers drop down to his waist. Dean’s eyes follow them, and track slowly back up his bare torso to his very red face. He’s always hated that he easily blushes like this, Dean inevitably notices and never misses a chance to tease him about it.
Not this time, though.
“Sammy-I,” Dean says, halting over every single syllable. It’s in that husky whisper that had gotten to Sam all those days ago, and this is how it really feels to hear the real voice from the real man.
“Me too, Dean,” Sam manages to say, just before his lips are otherwise occupied.
They kiss, tentative and careful, Dean being so achingly gentle that Sam feels his heart skip several beats with the joy of being treasured like this. Dean lays them down again, holding Sam close and kissing him more definitely now. Like he means it, like he’s letting himself mean it.
Finally they break for air, both gasping with the newness of it.
“Fuck, you taste so much better,” Dean says.
“Yeah, never start smoking or whatever she was doing,” Sam says, him overcome with a big yawn. Suddenly he feels like he hasn’t really slept in days. He pulls the covers out from under Dean and holds him close. “It okay if I fall asleep on you?” Sam asks in an already sleepy mumble.
Sam barely stops himself from purring with the pleasure of feeling Dean’s hand stroking his bare back in a lazy circle. “Yeah, Sammy,” he says in that husky whisper that Sam’s sure he’s never going to hear enough of no matter how long they’ve got left to live together. Together together that is.
~~~~
Back to Masterpost
There’s been some stuff missing in the garage lately, tools, the rope that usually lives in the Impala’s trunk, that kind of thing. To avoid dealing with the is-Michael-still-lurking-issue, or the WTF-Sam-issue, Dean decides to investigate something mundane and petty instead. His first guess is that the other hunters were helping themselves to his stash of supplies without asking. Or maybe their “chief” Mr. New-Bobby had approved their sticky fingers. All he knows is, his shit is missing. He sits at the workbench in the garage and checks the last week or so of the video files from the video monitoring system that he’d installed a few years ago for the garage entrance.
He initially just wants to see who’s been coming and going, maybe find out if there are any patterns. At first, Dean sees the usual folks, himself, Sam, Cas and Jack, all expected and boring. Then there’s an unfortunately long interlude of mom and New-Bobby that he fast forwards through without looking too closely at the details. But then finally, there’s someone he doesn’t recognize. She’s beautiful, on the small side, with dark hair. She’s moving so quickly he can’t see her face clearly, but then she pauses and the video shows a very clear retinal flare. She slips in through the door to the bunker. He looks at the date and time, four days ago. Back when he’d first heard the noises in the hallway, and Sam had started…everything between them.
He fast forwards through the last few days and there’s nothing, until about an hour ago when Sam comes in. He sees Sam and his big hulking shoulders rolling one of the vintage motorcycles out of the garage door without starting it which is weird enough, and also-Sam doesn’t know how to ride a motorcycle. Dean pauses the playback when Sam comes back into the garage without the motorcycle. His face comes into clear focus, and Dean’s not sure what he’s seeing. Is it a video artifact, or is he just misreading it, he’s not sure. He rewinds and plays it forward again, and there-Sam’s eyes flash in that distinctive otherworldly, monster-y way that all of them seem to have on video. It’s a shock seeing the flare coming from Sam’s eyes though, it reminds Dean of seeing the blue angel flash when Gadreel would take over. Never again, he’d promised himself.
The likely meaning of it all crashes into him, crushing him under its weight. He needs to do something about this-now. Either Sam is possessed by something or there's a creature at loose in the bunker that is able to do a bang-up job of impersonating him. The woman from four days ago, the one with the retinal flare, could she have been some sort of shape-shifter?
Dean’s stomach lurches as he considers a little further. The Sam that he’d kissed and everything else in the kitchen yesterday, that probably hadn’t been his Sam. He should have known, it wouldn’t ever be that easy or simple for Sam to cross that line. And Sam wouldn’t have tasted like the smoky remnants of an incense burner. Who or what would taste like that, though?
“Me…Dean, it would taste like me,” Sam says from right behind him. And he knows he didn’t say a damn thing out loud, knows in an instant that this is a monster that can read his mind, and more importantly is one who is not really his Sam. He whirls around throwing a punch low and hard, all his force and power and rage behind his fist. Not-Sam flies back into the storage cabinet, knocking his head into the cement brick wall with an audible crack. He crashes to the floor and goes limp like he’s been knocked out.
Dean throws himself forward, pinning him to the rough floor. Not-Sam thrashes underneath him, struggling to push Dean off.
“You’re not him, so who the fuck are you?” Dean yells into his not-brother’s face. “Where the hell is my brother?”
Dean realizes that if this is Sam’s body, then he just took a really hard hit to the head, because his brother’s eyes can’t seem to focus. He worries for a split second that he’s hurt his brother. The dude is the last person in the world who deserves yet another head injury. But this isn’t his brother, right?
In the next split second, Sam’s face crumples up into the biggest grin, and he bursts out laughing, sarcastic and harsh. “Took you long enough, asshole,” Sam spits up into Dean’s face.
Dean’s not falling for it though, little brother tricks pulled on him by something that’s not really his little brother are still just a distraction ploy. He tightens his hold on Sam’s wrists. “Tell me now, or I’ll gut you here and now like you deserve.”
“Tch, tch, tch, Dean-o, that’s no way to treat a lady,” Sam says, his face changing and melting into someone else’s.
Dean’s grip on her wrists falters as they transform into something much smaller, suddenly she looks very familiar, she’s the woman on the video system from a few days ago. But it’s more than that, he knows he should recognize who she is, but all he can do is fight to hold her down. She’s so damn strong, even weakened with the shot she took to the head, he’s not going to be able to hold her much longer. He struggles and yells, hoping against hope that his brother is somewhere close enough that he can hear him, “Sam! I need you! In the garage, now!”
The fight goes on, the woman or whatever she is really knows how to hold her own, even with the head injury. When she manages to get a hand free, she keeps reaching for his chest like she wants to rip his heart out or something. He finally gets her flipped over in a wrestling hold, her face smashed against the cement floor, his knee on her lower back. That’s when he remembers a similar fight, one that he’d definitely been losing, until Sam had saved him at the last moment. “You’re that qareen thing, I thought we already killed you.”
She struggles beneath him and almost throws him off completely. “That was my sister you fucking asshole. I’m here to return the fucking favor.”
Dean slams her head into the cement floor as hard as he can manage. Her struggling weakens quite a bit. “You’ve been messing with us, huh? For how long?” Dean asks, stomach dropping with the realization that all of it, everything he thought he’d gotten in the last few days was a damn lie.
“You two…ah it’s been so damn fun. Your angst is off-the-charts delicious, I have to tell you. Wish I was a siren, I’d be feeding on you forever.”
“Sam! It’s a qareen, you gotta find the heart thingy!” Dean yells. He’s heartened to hear some crashing down the hall. That means Sam is moving at least, she didn’t have him immobilized or worse. The sounds of something crashing into the walls gets louder and closer.
“Dean!” Sam yells. He lands in the garage entrance, tied to a chair that he’s apparently been jumping down the hall, bashing into the walls from the looks of him. He’s red and flustered, hair everywhere with a furious look on his face. “I know right where it is, I just can’t get myself untied.”
Dean watches with amusement as Sam jumps the chair closer and closer, stopping just next to them. He slams the qareen’s head into the floor again when she laughs. “Heya, Sammy,” Dean says with relief, he’s so damn glad to see him. “Can you hold her with your feet or something so I can untie you?” Sam’s giant feet land on her back and press down-hard.
The qareen lets out a grunt of pain and weakly squirms under all the weight that Sam’s pressing into her. “Get off me you fucking oaf!”
“Not today,” Sam says between gritted teeth, struggling to keep enough force on her to hold her down. Dean gets him untied and then they’re both holding her immobile beneath them. Dean tries not to feel how his fingers are still tingling from touching Sam’s skin. This isn’t a thing he should ever think about again, especially not with the real Sam right there and a monster beneath them they need to deal with.
“You said you know where the heart thing is stashed?” Dean asks, panting hard at the exertion of the fight and the sheer relief of seeing his brother alive.
Sam stretches out to grab a giant wrench from the work bench and hits the qareen upside the head. In an instant she goes limp under the two of them. “Yeah, it’s in my room. You hold her, just in case she comes around.”
“Yeah, I’ve got her, go,” Dean says, grabbing a length of rope from one of the bins under the work bench. He quickly secures her legs to her arms behind her in a hopefully inescapable series of wraps and knots. “Wait, why is it in your room?” Dean asks Sam’s retreating back. He doesn’t get an answer, maybe he won’t get any answers out of this whole thing. It’s all so messed up. He punches the qareen in her slackened face just because, she may have finally done what so many of their other supernatural foes have attempted over the years-broken the Winchesters completely.
Dean thinks about it while he has the chance and Sam isn’t here distracting him. Are they really truly broken this time, is this a thing they can come back from? Maybe she didn’t do the same thing to both of them? That’s the only chance he can see, because he doesn’t know if he can live with Sam knowing the truth after all these years. Sam hadn’t seemed particularly freaked or upset just now, but then they were in the middle of taking down the qareen. He’s going to go with that for the moment, just pretend nothing has changed, nothing major has happened. Hopefully he can get through this to the other side with his brother not hating him forever or leaving or worse. (What could be worse than that?)
Sam races down the hall to his bedroom and drops to his knees next to his bed. He grabs his memory box, in a second he’s got it open and his sharpest silver knife is embedded in the black and shriveled thing that used to be the qareen’s heart. It’s a lot juicier than he’d hoped, it leaks all over the brochure from that retirement home. He picks the brochure up and takes it out, closes the memory box and shoves it back under his bed. Holding the brochure with the stabbed heart he walks back down the hall towards his brother. The one who he probably will never be able to look in the eye again. He pauses in the garage doorway, takes a deep breath and tries to hide everything he’s feeling. It’s pretty easy, he’s been doing it for twenty years now.
“She dead?” Sam asks, holding the brochure out so Dean can see the stabbed heart. It looks like his own feels, black and crumbled, run through so thoroughly, the pain that’s coursing through him is almost too much to bear.
“Dead and dusted, yeah. Guess you’re two for two on killing qareens now,” Dean says, standing up from the mess on the garage floor that used to be the qareen. He looks down at the blackened thing in the brochure and smiles. “She put it in your memory box, huh?”
“How did you even kn-?” Sam asks, cutting himself off. Because of course they have no visible secrets, just like when they lived out of the car all those years. Only the invisible ones that they keep inside where they’re supposed to be safe.
“I think it’s cute you keeping that. And that retirement place was really nice. I wouldn’t mind ending up there,” Dean says.
“Really?” Sam asks, unbelieving that Dean’s voicing something like this, like it’s no big deal.
“It’d be good for us to have something to look forward to like that, don’t you think?” Dean asks.
Sam considers what exactly his brother means by this question. It could run the gamut from just not wanting to die alone, or to wanting to live together for the rest of their lives. As in: Together together. “It is, yeah, that’s why I kept it in my secret memory box that isn’t much of a secret apparently.”
“Sorry, I was vacuuming in there and it got knocked over and I couldn’t help myself. I apologize for snooping,” Dean says, sounding like he means it, but still in that big brother teasing way that makes Sam bristle a little at the invasiveness.
“You are a terrible snoop, always have been,” Sam says. “But I can’t complain too much about it, at least you vacuum.”
“Big brother code, man. Them’s the rules,” Dean says with a grin.
Sam feels it then, the two pathways they have from this moment. They can ignore what the qareen put them through and just continue on as they have always been. But…but what about if they choose the other path? The one where they have each other and make each other happy for the rest of their lives. Sam wants that with all his heart and soul, it’s a fierce and powerful need that makes him take down his walls and let Dean see it all plainly on his face. He watches his brother as he sees and understands, he sees the fear flicker over and turn into resolve. That’s his Dean, gotta make the big sacrifice, always has to be the bravest, most self-sacrificing shit around.
“I think of you as more than just my big brother though,” Sam says, still leaving Dean this one last offramp. He watches Dean’s face closely, sees when he makes the decision. Sam squares his shoulders and takes a deep breath, here comes the rejection he knows he deserves.
“I know, Sammy,” Dean says soft and careful.
Sam reaches out and cups the side of Dean’s face, remembers what it was like this past week, how he’d shared all of that with a creature and not this man that he’s loved in all ways for his whole life. How he’d been so desperate for it that he’d missed all the signs that it hadn’t really been his Dean. “I’m just sorry that it wasn’t really you.”
“Me too, I would have like to have been there, and vice versa, I guess,” Dean says, smiling so wide and genuine, Sam can’t help himself, he presses his fingertips in a bit harder into the skin of Dean’s cheek, the warm tingle of their connection still so strong. He feels his blackened heart absorbing this small moment of tenderness, it’ll be enough to get by on, it’ll have to be. He drops his hand and starts to walk away.
“We should probably talk about all this,” Dean says, just as Sam is passing out of the garage. He stops and thinks for a moment about how hard it must have been for his brother to say those words. He turns around and looks at Dean, the mess of the dead qareen at his feet, the vast space of the garage behind him. He looks so small and fierce and he’s so dear, he means everything to Sam, he gasps as his heart seems to do a turn in his chest. He presses his hand over it, like he’s holding it inside. And maybe he is.
“Yeah, if you want to, sure. Meet me in the kitchen, I need to go get changed,” Sam says, and then he’s down the hall and back in his room, safe for the moment. He strips his clothes off and washes his face in the sink. All of a sudden he’s so damn tired he can barely stand. The worry and emotions of it all is too much. He curls up in bed and hopes Dean will be able to wait to talk.
Sam wakes up, surprised that he had been able to fall asleep. His front side is warm, because there’s someone next to him in the bed. He opens his eyes and sees that it’s Dean, and for a long moment he just stares, even though Dean obviously sees he’s awake. He catalogs through his feelings quickly and can’t find anything that quite matches, dread, pleased surprise, inevitability-all of that and more.
“Thought we were meeting in the kitchen,” Sam says, glad that he’s all the way under the covers since he’s not wearing a thing. Hopefully Dean hasn’t noticed, he doesn’t want this to get more awkward than it’s already going to be.
“I couldn’t wait anymore, so I thought I’d come in here and wait,” Dean admits.
That seems like they’re off to a good start, that Dean wants to be in the same room with him, even take the chance to lay down on his bed and wait for him to wake up.
“How long was I out?” Sam asks.
“Long enough,” Dean says.
“Long enough for what?” Sam asks.
“How was her heart in your memory box, Sam? I thought that was just for whoever was controlling the qareen,” Dean says, instead of answering his question. Sam guesses it was just long enough for Dean to start obsessing over the who did what to whom issues.
“She said she was the qareen’s sister, the one we killed before, right?”
“Yeah, something like that, she said she was coming here to mess with us and avenge her sister,” Dean says, after a few beats where Sam can’t think of a thing to say, because he knows what Dean is obsessing over, Dean carries on, “She sure as hell messed with us, not so much on the avenging.”
“I wasn’t controlling her if that’s what you’re thinking,” Sam says.
“No-what, why would I think that?” Dean sputters, obviously offended at the idea.
“Well, we’re both wondering why the hell she would put her own heart in my memory box?” Sam asks.
“Maybe she wanted me to find it? Mess us up even more or something?” Dean asks.
“She really did screw with us, didn’t she?” Sam asks, regretting using the word screw almost immediately.
“It doesn’t have to screw…uh, mess us up, unless-you think it has to,” Dean says, biting his lip like he’s trying not to say something more.
That right there is enough to blow Sam’s mind completely apart, maybe for good. How can he possibly trust this isn’t some leftover effect from the qareen? “I don’t-I mean, you’re right it doesn’t have to mess us up. We can just forget it happened, right?”
“If that’s what you want, sure, we can give it a try. We’ll just forget the last few days ever happened,” Dean says, starting to sit up, he obviously wants to get out as fast as possible.
Sam sits up too, wanting to stop Dean before he leaves, forgetting that he’s naked, the covers drop down to his waist. Dean’s eyes follow them, and track slowly back up his bare torso to his very red face. He’s always hated that he easily blushes like this, Dean inevitably notices and never misses a chance to tease him about it.
Not this time, though.
“Sammy-I,” Dean says, halting over every single syllable. It’s in that husky whisper that had gotten to Sam all those days ago, and this is how it really feels to hear the real voice from the real man.
“Me too, Dean,” Sam manages to say, just before his lips are otherwise occupied.
They kiss, tentative and careful, Dean being so achingly gentle that Sam feels his heart skip several beats with the joy of being treasured like this. Dean lays them down again, holding Sam close and kissing him more definitely now. Like he means it, like he’s letting himself mean it.
Finally they break for air, both gasping with the newness of it.
“Fuck, you taste so much better,” Dean says.
“Yeah, never start smoking or whatever she was doing,” Sam says, him overcome with a big yawn. Suddenly he feels like he hasn’t really slept in days. He pulls the covers out from under Dean and holds him close. “It okay if I fall asleep on you?” Sam asks in an already sleepy mumble.
Sam barely stops himself from purring with the pleasure of feeling Dean’s hand stroking his bare back in a lazy circle. “Yeah, Sammy,” he says in that husky whisper that Sam’s sure he’s never going to hear enough of no matter how long they’ve got left to live together. Together together that is.
~~~~
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